The bullshit guy

Twenty years ago a Yale philosopher gave a little-noticed lecture on the improbable subject of bullshit. Now, republished as a 67-page pamphlet, it has become a publishing sensation and its author is being feted as a guru. How did that happen? Gary Younge finds out

Thu 12 May 2005 05.19 EDT
First published on Thu 12 May 2005 05.19 EDT

There are some dissonant images that the public can't resist. Such as the sight of a nun breakdancing in her habit in the film Sister Act, or elderly rural women casually remarking on which locals "like a bit of cock" in Little Britain's village shop. Their incongruity holds a particular appeal. We like them not just because they don't happen but because they shouldn't happen and secretly we wish that they would.

So when a septuagenarian philosophy professor brings out a book called On Bullshit and it goes into its 10th reprint in just a few months, maybe we shouldn't be too surprised.

"People are delighted by the idea of an Ivy League professor using this kind of language," says Harry Frankfurt philosopher emeritus at Princeton University. "I can't say I'm surprised by the response it has got ... I'm amazed."

Frankfurt, 75, has a right to be. For however puerile we are now, we are presumably not a whole lot more so than when the essay was first written to be delivered at a lecture 20 years ago.

Back then Frankfurt was a fellow at the Whitney Humanity centre at Yale. One of the obligations that came with membership of the centre was to give a lecture every so often. Frankfurt gave one entitled "On Bullshit".

The lecture received a good response. While it is not particularly illuminating it is perceptive about something that is pervasive yet rarely examined. Some of it reads like a candidate for Private Eye's Pseud's Corner: "Excrement is not designed or crafted at all," he writes. "It is merely emitted or dumped. It may have a more or less coherent shape, or it may not, but it is in any case certainly not wrought."

One physicist, keen to take a jibe at the influence of philosopher Jacques Derrida who was popular at Yale at the time, told Frankfurt it was highly appropriate because: "Yale had become the bullshit capital of the world."

It was published as an essay in a small circulation journal called Raritan a year later. Some time after that it was included in a collection of Frankfurt's essays published by Cambridge University Press.

It made a mark but no great waves. "It attracted a certain amount of attention at the time," says Frankfurt. "Over the course of the years I would get letters and emails telling me what they thought of it." Nonetheless, of all the pieces he had ever written this was the one on which Frankfurt got the most feedback. A man in Wales set it to music. In the small world of academe and philosophy it was a modest success.

But when the editor for Philosophy at Princeton University Press, Ian Malcolm, raised Frankfurt's name in relation to his other work recently, he would hear the esteemed professor referred to as "the Bullshit guy." "It became evident that the essay had a life of its own," says Malcolm. "But there were people outside of the academy and philosophy who had not read it."

So it was re-released, not as part of a collection but as a piece of work in itself: a pocket-sized, hardback book of 67 pages with big print and wide margins. "I was surprised when they said they wanted to publish it as a book because I didn't think there was enough there for a book. But my editor said: "You can do a lot with page sizes and margins."

But even more baffling to Frankfurt than the fact that Princeton wanted to republish his essay, was just how many people clearly want to read it. The book has become a bestseller in the United States, selling 175,000 copies and propelling Frankfurt for a short while on to the talkshow circuit. Released in February in England it is currently selling at the rate of 50 copies a day.

What changed in the past two decades, beyond Malcolm's marketing savvy, to transform a lecture of limited academic interest into a popular bestseller? Malcolm says: "There was no one trigger. It was partly because it had lasted so long. But when I got a couple of reader reports back about it, it was clear that the issues it raised seem more alive now than it was before. People related it to the debate in Britain about spin."

Ask Frankfurt why he thinks the book is doing so well and you will get no bullshit. "I really don't know," he says. "People are starved of a more straightforward approach to reality. They are sick of bullshit. They are people who don't try to avoid a straight confrontation with the truth ... But then this would be true 20 years ago."

Frustrating though this is for the interviewer, Frankfurt is being true to his subject when he refuses to offer a conclusion that he simply has not reached. "Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about," he writes. "Thus the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person's obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic exceed his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic."

Herein lies the best clue as to what might have made Frankfurt's essay so prescient, 20 years before its time. The prevalence of communication - 24-hour news, blogs, advertising, newspaper supplements and public relations has enabled almost anyone to become a pundit and given them unlimited time and space in which to keep talking, writing and pitching. The improvised banter of the half-informed analyst used to be the preserve of election night. With cable television channels having to fill airtime around the clock, not to mention the infinite space offered by the internet, there is now virtually no limit on either who might consider themselves a pundit or how long they might go on for.

"There's not much alternative to saying whatever comes into your mind," says Frankfurt. "If that is what you're paid to do."

But if the media is producing more of it, according to Frankfurt politicians still produce the most. "Almost any political figure you like is a 24-hour bullshitter," he says.

How about Howard Dean or John McCain I ask - two straight-talking Americans from the left and the right who burned briefly and brightly in their respective primaries. "I think people were very refreshed by that," he says.

The trouble is, they lost. Isn't that proof that people, ultimately, like just a little bit of bullshit? "Any phenomena that is as persistent and pervasive as bullshit must have some purpose," he says. "There must be something about it that makes it survive."

Frankfurt is obliging and self-effacing like that. I can't count the number of times he said: "I don't know," "You might be right," or "I've never thought of it like that." Chatty and congenial? I thought so until I got to the last line of his book.

"Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial - notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit."